Life is a story you write as you go.
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The barrier beaches of Atlantic Beach and the Rockaway Peninsula, in southwest Nassau County and the very southeast of New York City — the Rockaways are about as far away as you can go from midtown Manhattan and still be in the city. From the beaches you can watch the ships come in and out of the harbor. Beyond is the Hudson River outlet to the Atlantic Ocean and the coast of New Jersey.
Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan, by the New York Public Library.
2nd Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
South along the East River from above the Triborough Bridge (1984). What would an American city be without its baseball fields? You can see the contrast in buildings and neighborhoods as you look south. The Empire State Building rises in midtown, where the bedrock is close to the surface. The bedrock does not get close enough to the surface again until downtown, where you see the original twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Downtown Manhattan from over the Brooklyn Navy Yard (1984).
One of the three Cosmopolitan Convair 440 aircraft that used to fly schedules between Boston and Farmingdale Republic Airport on Long Island (1980). The copilot is preflighting the aircraft. It was said this particular aircraft had belonged to John F. Kennedy, before he became president.
The Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History was completely rebuilt in 2000. The sky theater is the sphere, and models of various astronomical and physical objects use the sphere as a scale reference. Do you see Saturn and Jupiter at the right? Relative to those, the sphere is the size of the Sun. The computers used to run the skyshows during the day are used for astrophysics at night.
Inside the original Hayden Planetarium on the second floor.
On the lower west side of Manhattan. Commuting.
The New York Doll Hospital was in Midtown on Lexington Avenue.
Governor’s Island, in the upper Harbor, is a quiet contrast to nearby downtown. The island was the home of the US First Army and was later a US Coast Guard base. It was the longest serving military base in the U.S. The island is now a park, operated by the National Park Service and New York State. My father had served in the Army since WWII, and retired as an officer in military government. Once in a while he took the family to Governors Island while it was still an active base, to treat us to dinner at the officer’s club.
Downtown on Wall Street is Federal Hall, the first site of the US Federal government. The Bill of Rights was written here. It is now part of the National Park Service, and worth a visit. Since I was little, I’ve been deeply struck that the heart of Wall Street is not a financial powerhouse, but this symbol of our federal government with its checks and balances. Downtown has a rich historical heritage.
Several generations of buildings in downtown New York. You see Trinity Church on Wall Street, the American Stock Exchange (with the American flag), and the World Trade Center. (circa 1983)
The Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island.
Uptown around Central Park (1984)
Broadway curves across in the foreground. It spans the length of Manhattan and follows the original Native American path. The American Museum of Natural History with the original dome of the art deco planetarium is on the near side of the park at West 81st Street. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is just across the park on 5th Avenue.
The Concorde at British Airways at JFK. The World Trade Center in cloud.
During my late teens I started taking flying lessons. I completed earning my pilot’s license while I was in college, during spare time.
I went to several undergraduate colleges. And I took a break in between to work. You can read a little about that on my separate page.
While I was a graduate student back in New York, I worked one year in New York Harbor for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection, for their Water Quality Survey. You can read a little about that, and see photos of our work and of scenes in New York Harbor here.
During the following year as a graduate student, I worked at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland in their Cryogenics, Propulsion, & Fluid Systems Branch supporting science satellites, especially the Cosmic Background Explorer. While there I was a member of their radio club WA3NAN. I also learned sailing on the South River near Annapolis.
The photo below is looking south over West Point, NY and the Hudson River, towards the gap at Bear Mountain. For about 10 years I went on public geology field trips, called “On the Rocks”, run by geologists Charles Merguerian (Hofstra University) and John Sanders (Barnard College). They ran two trips each spring and two each autumn. Their trips let one see for oneself the rocks and geological relationships throughout New York City and the surrounding region: through Connecticut, Upstate New York, northern New Jersey, and Long Island. The geology is complex — a complex puzzle in time and space. This view shows the Hudson River cutting through a fault zone in the Hudson Highlands. The Highlands extend from the Green Mountains and the Berkshires in western New England to Reading, Pennsylvania. But a spur extends from here southward and is the bedrock on which Manhattan is built. We did the field trips until Prof. Sanders passed away. I really liked going out to the field, to see the rocks and evidence for myself, and to try to think through and test for myself the current questions and theories in geology. How do you go from what you can see to what you cannot?
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How do you go from what you see to what you cannot? While I worked at NASA Goddard I troubleshooted a fluid systems problem on a satellite that had just been built. In all-up testing, the pressures and temperatures were completely off-scale, and not what were expected. I traced the design through first principles, and what I realized was that the contractor had used results from their computer model without understanding the assumptions behind it, nor having motivation or an independent way to test if the values really made sense. How would you know if something important was missed? You could hit a crisis. Perhaps you might have some wisdom and experience to help you, so you could recognize a problem and try to figure it out. Or you might be stuck or in a trap, and you might not even know it.
This was not long after the space shuttle Challenger accident, and at about the time the Hubble Space Telescope mirror problem was discovered –where understanding having a test in reality were also crucial matters. The aerospace industry had been downsizing since the end of the Apollo program and the end of the Vietnam War. The industry had beginner and senior engineers, but fewer mid-level engineers. And there were widespread complaints in the industry about companies putting in more business managers instead of engineering managers. Manuals and regulations were looking more like they came from a schoolhouse rather than from people who had field experiences and who recognized what problems could occur. I realized much of my university education was focused on analytical problem solving, but fell far short in learning how to deal first-hand with the messy real world. It was hit-or-miss if you got more. Science education (as well as other education) was tending to focus on concepts, but to such a degree that, in trying to master the concepts, important parts of yourself could be left out. You need to have your own surprises, deal with your own mistakes, go through your own subjectivity, and work through your own thinking too. And you need to taste for yourself the questions in the field and where the thinking is coming from. You need to consider evidence for yourself. All those experiences are vital for developing better objectivity. It was so tempting, and there was lots of pressure, to just look up answers from somewhere else. It is even more so now with the Internet. But those could be other people’s answers and not really yours. Or you could just get thrown into the water and be expected to swim.
This was a much bigger problem than just my troubleshooting. The patterns are still there.
I was deeply concerned — and I still am — that wisdom, technical and other kinds, are not adequately passed on, nor is the environment adequate for developing needed wisdom. Part of maturing is seeing past the invisible walls we put up around ourselves. Part of maturing is developing our capacities. You need challenges in life, and proper nurturing. You need to test out your imagination. We are always at the edge. We are always at the frontiers. It is humanity’s strength that we keep coming through and give ourselves the opportunities that never existed before. But it doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
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For several years I volunteered as an aerospace education officer, cadet programs officer, pilot, and deputy commander in a Civil Air Patrol composite squadron. I took the aerial photo above during a cross-country flight to Sullivan County.
During the late 1990s I tried playing with 2 meters for a few years. With an HT and a disc cone stacked above the TV antenna, I was able to locate most of the repeaters within 50 miles of my home on Long Island, and I succeeded in having QSOs with as far away as central New Jersey. I also spent time to re-educate myself. I built some kits. I passed my Advanced and Extra Class license tests together, which included passing the 20 WPM Morse Code test.
I also enjoyed listening to shortwave broadcasts. At the time I was studying East Asian cultures and languages. I received some nice QSLs from NHK Radio Japan, and also a neat little calculator from them for responding to a question. In response to my request, NHK did a special program about the Japanese amateur comet hunters when Comet Hyakutake was discovered. During 9/11 the local news broadcasts in New York were awful, and I relied heavily on the BBC for news and good information.
For several years I studied Japanese and Chinese Mandarin languages. I learned a little Korean too. I studied some of their history, literature, and art. And I studied brush writing with a young master Japanese calligrapher, Masako Inkyo, for 4 years as well. More deeply, I did research on early-childhood psychology, and on the psychological contrasts between East Asian cultures and the West. Culture is much more than a Disney ride. In Japan the national curriculum has Japanese children start to learn electronics in 7th grade.
I wrote a separate page, About Chinese & Japanese Writing | wa2jqz (wordpress.com). This will open as a separate page, and you can return back here when you’re done.
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Radio Rescue by Lynne Barasch is a wonderful book for young readers on ham radio with a taste of its history. It is a picture story book about the author’s father, when he became a very young licensed ham radio operator at the age of 10, in the 1920s, in New York City. The book wonderfully captures the spirit of ham radio, then and now, for young and old. In those earlier days, to place a person-to-person telephone call across the country could take hours. How the world could open up with an amateur radio license. The technology was developing, yet it was simpler too. One could put together equipment on one’s own, or with a little help, and be at the frontiers of the science and at the frontiers of what one could do. Learning Morse Code was learning a new language that gave you that freedom. You could have fun, and do serious things too. There is a radio rescue in the story. It is something that can happen without warning, even for a child radio amateur. To my mind, this illuminates a character of ham radio that goes beyond words. As hams we are a real part of the community, probably more than many folks recognize. And we give back, in our learning and play, and also when the community is in danger, even when all else fails. More deeply, it is possible for us to discover that our technology doesn’t have to insulate us. We in fact are always at the edge in life. When we reach out in our growing, on our own paths, our technical journeys can place us in touch with that edge. And we may discover more deeply how we do improve our lives with our technical developments. The neighborhood of electronics supply shops in downtown New York on Cortland Street, mentioned in the book, was demolished when the World Trade Center was built. But I met some older hams who still could tell me about it when they used it during their younger days. I very much recommend this book, especially as a New Yorker who was fortunate to get a taste of what is in this story. The author lived in a town not far from where I lived.
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On the topic of young people now in amateur radio, including emergency services and meeting people elsewhere, South Carolina public television did this 5-minute story in 2018: The Importance of HAM Radio During a Storm
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I worked for several years as a docent in all of the galleries at the Cradle of Aviation Museum at Mitchel Field in Garden City, New York, on Long Island. I wrote a page of its own about that.
wa2jqz 